Watch Out for %CN% if you use Other Names

Novell Cool Solutions: Feature

Here's a very useful tip from Dave S., IS Design Team, Transco, UK. Tuck this away for future troubleshooting forays.

I have what I think is a very useful tip for application scripters - discovered from bitter experience.

The tip is - Watch out for %CN% if you use 'other names'.

In order to get a user's NDS ID into an application's settings (e.g. into a username setting in the registry), the general approach (in the ZENworks Help) is to use the %CN% variable in the NAL App object. The idea is that when the app is installed, NAL will substitute the actual value of CN (the user's Common Name).

Normally this works fine, but there is a gotcha. If the user has had one or more 'other names' set in NWAdmin, these can become alternative values for CN (if you do 'nlist user=xxxx /d' you can see these multiple names). NAL seems to pick the first name from the list to substitute. Again, nine times out of ten this will be fine - it will be the user's login ID. But occasionally one of the 'other names' becomes the first name in the list and NAL will use this instead of the login ID.

It took us quite a while to work out why some of our users weren't getting auto-registered in the Fax server, while most were. It looks like the best answer is to use %LOGIN_NAME% rather than %CN% if you are using 'other names'. (Provided your login names aren't longer than 8 characters...)